Peenie Wallie: July 2011 Archives

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July 31, 2011

Clear Creek Rafting

Scott, Shelly, and Rachel stopped by on their cross country tour. We were glad to have them as we'd not seen them in some time. Probably, the last time we'd seen them was when I was working in Tullahoma a few years back. Was great to see them. We took the opportunity to do a little white water rafting up at Idaho Springs today. We had nice weather, and the creek was up higher than it's ever been when we ran it before in previous summers. I understand they got a lot of snow in the mountains, it was apparently a late thaw, plus we've had lots of rain this summer. So, the creek was up, but we all managed to stay in the boat. Loads of fun. Jennifer and I will miss them when they're gone.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 31, 2011 at 8:39 PM : Comments (2) | Permalink

July 30, 2011

Mission Graffiti: Catching Up

Above: Harrison and 16th.

Above: Mural at 21st and Bryant.

Above: Mural at 21st and Bryant by Reyes.

Above: Graffiti at 2044 Bryant Street.

Above: Mural at 2044 Bryant Street by Amanda Lynn.

Above: Graffiti at 2044 Bryant Street.

Above: Graffiti at 2050 Bryant Street.

Above: Goldfish stencil art by Jeremy Novy at 2050 Bryant Street.

Above: Graffiti at 2050 Bryant Street.

Above: Mural by Joel Bergner at 2060 Bryant Street.

Above: Graffiti at 2060 Bryant Street.

Above: Dan Plasma mural at Page and Fillmore.

Above: Searius Mural at Fillmore by "DEMYS 111" and Pure Talent. This was originally done in 2005, and then redone in 2008.

http://www.flickr.com/people/phunk/

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 30, 2011 at 11:50 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Where indeed?

I found this little note today when I was cleaning up. A note I scribbled down in haste when Jennifer said something particularly cute. Classic.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 30, 2011 at 2:03 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

July 29, 2011

Coonie Lives!

I'm not sure how large coons get, but I'd say this is a fairly large one.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 29, 2011 at 2:15 PM : Comments (2) | Permalink

July 27, 2011

Mission Graffiti: Miscellaneous

Above: AWR mural on a 20' container at 14th & Folsom with bookends by Amanda Lynn.

Above: Girl on 20' container at 14th & Folsom painted by Amanda Lynn.

Above: Amanda Lynn mural at Congdon and Silver.

Above: Mural at 25th and Mission.

Above: Lilac Alley mural.

Above: Jet Martinez mural at 24th and Capp.

Above: Mural at 24th and Capp.

Above: Joel Bergner mural at 24th and Capp.

Above: Mural in Lucky Alley.

Above: Mural at 24th and Alabama.

Above: Mural at 24th and Florida.

Above: Mural at 21st and Florida.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 27, 2011 at 11:32 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Mission Graffiti: Balmy Alley

Above: Mural in Balmy Alley.

Above: Stencil art in Balmy Alley.

Above: Mural in Balmy Alley.

Above: Mural in Balmy Alley by artist Joel Bergner.

Above: Mural in Balmy Alley.

Above: Mural in Balmy Alley by artist Sirron Norris.

Above: Mural in Balmy Alley.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 27, 2011 at 10:01 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Mission Graffiti: Lilac Alley

Above: Lilac Alley mural.

Above: According to Amandas Aorta, this Lilac Alley mural is by Cuba.

Above: Lilac Alley mural.

Above: Mural at Capp and 24th.

Above: Cypress Alley wheatpaste.

Above: Cypress Alley mural.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 27, 2011 at 12:47 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

July 26, 2011

Mission Graffiti: Osage Alley

Above: Mural at Cunningham and Valencia.

Above: Mural at 888 Valencia.

Above: Hammerhead Shark stencil art at 983 Valencia.

Above: Mural at 1325 Valencia.

Above: Stencil art in Osage Alley.

Above: Osage Alley in the Mission District.

Above: Stencil art in Osage Alley.

Above: Mural in Osage Alley.

Above: Mural at Mission and 26th.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 26, 2011 at 11:01 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Campfire Tales

Mitch shot these photos last weekend. Somehow I missed this trick. I'm sort of so used to my place that I really can't see it anymore. These look like classic Huckleberry Finn type of photos.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 26, 2011 at 5:10 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

The more you look, the more you see

So I was going through my old photographs of Amanda Lynn murals, and I saw these two paintings of girls, but I couldn't really place where I'd seen the murals. I knew that it had to be close to the office, but I couldn't figure out where exactly.

After a bit of searching, I discovered that the two girls were bookends on an 'AWR' mural painted on a 20' shipping container. But the shipping container must have been moved away some time ago.

Then, when I was driving into work recently, I saw a place across the street with a bunch of shipping containers. And I thought..."Aha...that's probably where that AWR shipping container used to be..." and as I glanced at the stacks of containers, I realized that it was still there. The same AWR mural with the girls on each end. And I'd driven past it so many times that my brain has learned to tune it out.

Now, when I drive in to work, it's very important not to study the murals, as this leads to a quick, painful death in the SF traffic. But still, I'm constantly amazed at how efficiently our brains tune out our environments. It's a necessary, but confounding exercise.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 26, 2011 at 11:19 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

SOMA Graffiti: Langton Alley

Above: Langton Alley 'Rest In Peace' mural in the SOMA district.

Above: Precita Eyes 'Frisco's Wild Side' mural in Langton Alley in SOMA district.

Above: Recording studio mural at 1139 Howard Street in SOMA district.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 26, 2011 at 8:57 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

July 25, 2011

The City is what it does to you

There is this. This.

Sometime on Sunday Jennifer leaves and the light just pulls away from me. I crawl into bed about noon and start to hibernate. Around 10:00 at night, I try to print my boarding pass and I can't and I'm thoroughly pissed at this point cuz this is the third week in a row I can't print my stupid boarding pass and I call up SouthWest and I'm ready to let her have it this time. Only she's explaining that I've missed my flight already. Ha. I was supposed to fly out on Sunday, apparently. Who knew?

So I reschedule for the early morning flight and at some point, even Timmy leaves me and in the small hours of the morning, the alarm goes off and I spring out of bed. I can't wait to get back into the city and start shooting again.

Every Friday, when I pick up Jennifer, my stories go like this..."I saw a guy smoking crack in the street...a guy stole a Picasso off the wall of an art gallery...six people were swept to their deaths in the Hetch Hetchy reservoir...the cops killed a guy in Bayview..." etc. Just one breathless story after another. And then I turn to her and say "how'd your week go" and she says "I got some new shirts." So this is where we are. We live very different lives, she and I. We spend our weekends together in Colorado, but during the week, we're worlds apart.

At the airport, my flight is delayed again. Very common to have the flight delayed due to early morning fog. So I'm sitting tight at the airport in Denver, waiting for the air traffic controllers in SFO to give us the "Go Ahead" to take off from DEN.

I lost my second set of Bose Accoustic Noise Canceling Headphones recently, so I'm traveling without them which is maddening. There's a gate change, but I sit tight. A baby starts crying, and I stand up, cursing the gods, and stomp away towards my new gate.

On the way, I see a familiar face...I'm staring at her thinking..."Michelle?"

She turns to me, and Jennifer appears and I think..."Ha...how about that?" Of all the people to run into in one of the world's largest airports, who would have thought I'd run into my own daughter?

So I go with her to her gate. She's flying to New Mexico, of course. Just it wasn't on my radar screen because I was supposed to be in San Francisco already and it was just a fluke that I was delayed and she happened to be in the same terminal at nearly the same gate and, by chance, I lost my headphones and that squabbling baby sent me fleeing just at the time they were passing by. Very peculiar how everything lined up like that. And I have to admit that I wondered if maybe it wasn't an accident.

While waiting for her flight to take off, I picked up another ticket for her to go to Florida for a week in August because, let's be honest. She's underprivileged. That much is clear.

She flies away and I crawl into a different airplane. I'm in seat 2A as always and the only disadvantage to this seat is that the malicious bastards in the bulkhead will always try to sneak something under their seats and I'm like..."Uh, no. You're going to have to put that in the overhead bin"

The flight is full so I grab a little oriental girl and tell her to sit in the middle seat and she does and promptly falls asleep on my shoulder, which I don't mind and we take off.

I recline her seat for her and then, as always, I look out the window as we fly, tracking our progress west above I-70. It's neat to see your house from above. The world scrolling by. Georgetown. Lake Dillon. Copper. Vail. Beaver Creek. Glenwood Springs. Grand Junction.

It's all nice and green until we get to the western slopes, and then the high desert. Utah is covered with salt lakes, not just the Great Salt Lake, but countless little ones scattered across the desert. Always, somewhere over Utah or Nevada my Diet Coke runs dry and I have to castigate the delusional flight attendants into doing my bidding.

It's a miracle that anyone lives down there at all. Utah and Nevada are as dry as dust. Straight roads. A few sporadically placed irrigated circular crops. Just death. Death. Death. And then finally, at the California Nevada Border, the Sierra Nevada mountains and some life again. Bushes and scrubby trees materialize and then, the Yosemite valley, the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, and the grand Central Valley. Always, we fly over Freemont or Modesto and then, the Sierra Madres and down down down into the southern end of San Francisco, over those insane Cargill salt flats and down into SFO.

At the airport, they repainted the blue and white curb which just irks me to no end. So, I go stand at the new blue-and-white curb and there's the FastTrack shuttle bus and every week I do the same thing. I go to the shuttle bus driver and ask him if he's sure that they're out of business and if they've changed their mind somehow, and if they won't take me back. But every time he shakes his head no. They're out of business. I have to park somewhere else now.

Now, I park at Park SFO, but only do so under protest and every week I leave without paying because I'm not happy about the arrangement. Namely, that there isn't any arrangement. I don't know them and they don't know me and I don't want to be parking there. Why can't FastTrack just let me park there again? So what if they lost their lease on the parking lot? How is that my fault?

I climb onto the motorcycle and leave the parking lot without paying and head north on the US 101. I just tack that thing up to about 80 mph because I don't want to get run over from behind, right? So I'm flying north on the US 101 and I just lay down on the seat until my helmet is touching the handlebars because this bike is light and the winds rip across the peninsula between Candlestick Park and Brisbane in a way that you can't know.

So I'm sailing north on the US 101 and I get into the city and now I'm going to snap a few murals before I go in. I find the mural Jack sent me right away. Drove straight to it and I hadn't seen it in 6 years. But I found it and shot it shortly before the sun got high enough in the sky to ruin the mural.

After work, I decided to really hit the Mission hard, looking for more murals. Now, I believe that "The more you look, the more you see." As Robert M. Pirsig observed in his glorious tome, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This is my new theory. The old theory was, "I've seen it all." The new theory is, "The more you look, the more you see."

So I'm out grid searching the mission and I roll through Clarion Alley, but I know today I've got to dig deeper. I've got to get down into the heart and soul of the most dangerous part of the mission.

I end up down around 26th and something...cruising these alleys I've never seen before and you just can't know. I can now state, unequivocally, that the Mission has the most graffiti of any district in San Francisco. It is the sin-qua-non of San Franciscan murals.

There are more alleys full of murals in the mission, than the other districts have murals. I'm wandering up and down these alleys I've never seen before. Never heard of before.

The first new alley I find has homeless people living in it.

The city is what it does to you. It brings into a very sharp focus the people you might normally not interact with. The lost and downtrodden. The homeless, despondent masses. And I don't know how they got here. Maybe they're drug addicts. Maybe they have mental problems. I don't know that it matters, necessarily. Only it's a given that they're here, and they're not going away, and I have to deal with them. I see them every day. Even if all you do is observe them, you can't help but be affected by them.

Last week, I watched a female homeless drug addict walk into a restaurant where I was eating lunch with the new consultant. She came in off the street, wolfed down the leftovers from a stranger in the Mexican restaurant, then went outside and finished it over a trashcan. No different than the coon on the game cam stealing my cat's food.

They are here, and you can't solve the problem, only you can observe it. But you're affected by the observation. Last week, I observed a different homeless female drug addict sprawled on the sidewalk in Caledonia Alley. When I came through, shooting photos, she tried to pull it together. To try to gather herself together, as it were. She tried to sit up, but was unsuccessful. So I just walked by her, as she sort of rolled around on the dirty sidewalk.

So now, I find this new graffiti drenched alley in the mission, but it's not without it's own homeless population, of course. Every rose has it's thorns.

I feel safe wearing the helmet. I don't take it off when I'm shooting. I never do. So, I'm shooting this new alley I've discovered in the Mission. Shooting like mad, and I get down to where the homeless are sleeping on the sidewalk, and I try not to disturb them. I really do. I don't want to interfere with them. I don't know what sort of deal they have going on, but I do know that they're frequently victims of violence, so I'm trying not to threaten them in any way.

One of the homeless guys is lying on the sidewalk in a sleeping bag. The other homeless guy comes stumbling out of the alley and he calls after him, "Check on me in a little bit...ok?"

"I will," the other homeless guy replies. "I'll watch out for you."

I'm shooting, and sort of trying to ignore them, but this is sort of touching. I mean, here you've got two humans who have fallen so low, that they're sleeping on the sidewalk in a dead-end alley. But somehow, they're watching out for each other.

"You watch out for him," I ask as he approaches.

"Yeah. You have to around here."

"Why is that?" I clarify. "Who bothers y'all? Kids?" I ask.

"Actually, it's really normal people. Someone throws a bottle and says, 'get a job', and the next thing you know they're beating the hell out of ya'," he replied.

"Jesus Christ." I replied.

"Yall watch out for each other, though?" I clarified.

"Yeah, well, we try to sleep during the day, and watch each other's backs. Then, at night, you have to be awake then. It's more dangerous then, of course."

"Doesn't the city pay you though?" I asked.

"Why? No. The city doesn't pay us anything. I get food stamps. But you don't get a check from the city. You have to have an address to get a check. Obviously, if you're homeless, you don't have an address, so no...we don't get any money from the city,"

"Oh."

"Who does these sidewalk stencils?" I ask, changing the subject.

"Oh, I know who does them. He lives around here. But I ain't tell'n." he replies.

"Well, they're very cool, " I reply. He's certainly talented.

And the homeless guy stumbled on down the alley, leaving his friend behind, asleep on the sidewalk. It's hard to imagine attacking the homeless. Difficult to fathom.

All I want to do is take photos, of course, and I'm shooting like mad. But I'm very far from home. So far out of my element. It's hard to remember where you are.

I wake up in mountains of Colorado, where I sleep with a .45 under my pillow and mounted a game cam inside my house to track the incursions of the wildlife. But then, a few hours later, I'm in an alley in a major metropolitan city and I sort of forget myself.

I'm shooting in this alley, and there's three street thugs with dogs that aren't on leashes and they tell me it's a one way road and I start getting smart with them. It goes like this:

"Just so you know, this is a one way road," the one big fat guy challenges.

"Yeah, well I don't really care about the law," I quip. With the same sarcasm that's got me so far in this world.

"Well, I'm just saying, if a car comes around the curve and hits you..."

"What curve? What traffic?" I challenge. It's absurd, but I've forgotten myself. I'm not in Colorado. I'm in the Mission. Talking tough to three strangers. With dogs. That aren't on leashes.

"Why don't you get the fuck out of our neighborhood," they offer.

It occurs to me that I've made a mistake. I shut my mouth. And continue shooting and moving slowly down the alley. The dogs don't kill me, and the brutes don't assault me, but I realize that I've made a serious miscalculation. I'm in an alley where a guy was beat to death earlier this year, smarting off to strangers. Not a good move.

So, I keep moving down the alley, shooting, driving a few feet, shooting some more. Slowly working my way through the Mission, albeit, in the wrong direction most of the time, but I'm not hurting anyone.

I'm finding alley after alley full of graffiti that I've never seen before and I'm getting further and further from the known parts of the city and falling deeper and deeper into the parts of the Mission where white people just don't go.

These murals are all of the Precita Eyes murals, which tend to portray people as victims. It's a common theme. Basically, the Indians and the Mexicans are prisoners in their own land, victims of the evil white man's aggression. This is a common, recurring theme in the Precita Eyes murals and it's why I tend not to shoot them because, if you teach someone from cradle to grave that they're a victim, then they're certainly victims.

Man's Inhumanity to Man

But this is where I find myself, and then I see a Jet Martinez mural and I'm really excited to find this gem and I get in position to shoot it, but as I do, a car pulls up in front of me, and about three to five Mexicans jump out of the little car and start assaulting some people on the sidewalk.

So, while I'm watching, this beating starts taking place and of course, I fire up my bike and get the fuck out of there. Because, I have no idea what's going on. Suddenly, it dawns on me that I'm very far out of my element. I get a safe distance from the fight, and then sort of return to the scene.

The Mexican thugs in the car have disappeared, but I spot the two that were assaulted standing on the street corner.

I pull up and talk to them..."Dude..WTF? What was that about? I saw those guys jump you. There were 4 or 5 of them. What was that about?"

"I dunno,"

"You don't know them?"

"No."

He had a massive shiner on his left eye already. Tears were streaming out of his left eye. He wasn't crying. That isn't my point. He'd just been cold-cocked in his left eye. I was surprised he was still walking.

"Why did they do that? They were estranyos? I clarified.

"Si."

Like..wow...wtf? I mean, I know we're all built of the crooked timber of humanity, but Lord God. Seriously, people. Suddenly, shooting in the Mission seemed a lot less romantic and a lot more dangerous, and I left the mission.

I stopped at my buddy that runs the Mexican stand on Mission and South Van Ness and I try to tell him what I saw. He says that the mission is more dangerous. Probably it was due to colors. Or due to territory. This one group can't cross 19th street, for some reason, apparently. Who knew?

So I climb back on my bike and head to the Marina, where the pretty white girls walk down the sidewalk.

But now, every time I see another guy on the sidewalk, I puff up like a pigeon in a snowstorm as the fight or flight adrenaline courses through me.

I go to a bar to have a beer and write for a bit. To try to put things into focus, but this only made it worse. The worse thing about the homeless is that there's only one solution, and after spending any time around them, you realize that the only solution isn't really one you could live with. So there is no solution.

I check my email and the pretty white girl I was supposed to go out with tomorrow night said we'd have to postpone.

I go home to my flat on Russian Hill and I think I've got to get it together, but I don't know how. I tell my room mate what I saw happened. She says she stopped a guy from getting beat to death when they were jumping on his head.

"I didn't help him," I offered.

"What did you do?" she asks helpfully.

"I got on my motorcycle and took off," I replied. It was nothing to be proud of. But it was so foreign to me. I had no idea what was going on. One second, I was taking photos of a mural, and the next second, people were jumping out of cars and fists were flying. I had no idea what was happening. It was very scary. Like a bad dream.

The problem with living in the city is that it's too intense. All of these people are living far too close together. It's like when they shove the uranium rods into the reactor and the chain reaction takes off. You cram a few million people into a 7 mile by 7 mile peninsula, and these no telling what will happen.

I wandered down to the local Escape From New York Pizza, not because I was hungry, but because I had to. I had to talk to someone about what I'd seen.

I feel like I'm surrounded by people, but I'm all alone.

Hey, guy. What can I get you?

"Tony. I saw a guy get jumped today in the Mission," I offered.

"We've got one slice of Hawaiian left," he replies.

"OK. I'll have that."

"What did you do?" he asks.

"Nothing. I turned and ran. I didn't help him." I admitted.

"Well, you've got to pick your battles."

That's the problem with the city, is that you see people who are failing. People are always dying and starving and fighting. And, in the suburbs, you don't see that. Where I live, I wake up and there are birds and deer and raccoons. Not people jumping out of cars and pummeling strangers in the streets. Not people starving and staggering and begging. Not that. Not like that.

I'm walking back from the pizza place, full of fear. Drowning in adrenaline and fear and raw emotions. I see a family walking across the street and I want to yell at them, "Get out! This city's not safe!" But obviously the city's not safe. People die here every day. Death is a part of life. It's just that you're so far removed from it in the suburbs. And here, you see people teetering on the brink of death on a daily basis.

I see a black man walking through the crosswalk the same time as me. He's wearing a SF Giants cap. Slowly, it dawns on me that he's homeless. On the other side of the street, I see him scanning the sidewalk. I see what he's looking for before he does. A half a cigarette is lying on the sidewalk. I spy it. Then he spies it, and starts contorting his body until he's low enough to pick it up.

How sad is that. How said is it that I knew what he was looking for and even saw it before he did.

Back at the flat, my motorcycle looks vulnerable and out of place on the sidewalk. This can't last. It will be stolen or vandalized. It's only a matter of time.

When I got inside the flat, I lock all of the locks. I always used to only lock one of the deadbolts. My roomie always locks them all, which I always thought was overkill. But not any more. I've learned to fear that which carves the city's streets at night. I lock all of the locks and retreat to the relative safety of my bedroom on Russian Hill.

I've got to get out, before it's too late. This city is killing me.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 25, 2011 at 10:09 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

July 24, 2011

Feeding the 'Attack Deer'

Mitch came up with his clan and we went and up to check out the buffalo herd at Ron Lewis's compound near Marshdale. The reindeer, fallow deer, and buffalo wouldn't come up to us, but the 'attack deer' and Billy the goat came right up to the fence and would eat about everything you pushed through, except mushrooms, it seems.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 24, 2011 at 10:36 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

July 23, 2011

The Weekly Photographs

Above: The Cargill Salt Flats at the south end of San Francisco Bay.

Above: An ancient mural in Clarion Alley.

Above: A recent addition to Clarion Alley.

Above: Mural at "New Sound" car stereo store at 1663 Valencia in the Mission.

Above: Mural in Lilac Alley at 25th in the Mission.

Above: Chad Hasegawa mural at Market and 6th.

Above: Chor Boogie mural at Market and 6th.

Above: Mural at Market and 7th.

Above: A recent addition to the corner of Mary and Howard in SOMA. Update: Amanda Lynn indicates this work is by Lango and Henry Lewis.

Above: Wheatpaste art in the Lower Haight near Kate's Kitchen.

Above: Mural in Lower Haight at Steinter/Haight Street.

Above: Mural at Haight and Steiner by Irvine-based Michael Kershnar:

Above: Mural at Haight and Steiner by Italian artist Galo.

Above: Mural at Haight and Steiner by Sacramento-based artist Skinner.

New Mural Debuts at Steiner and Haight

Above: Mural by Amanda Lynn on Haight Street.

Above: Mural at Nomad Body Piercing near Octavia at 1755 Market by Sacramento-based artist Skinner.

Above: Mural by Amanda Lynn at Valencia Street and Clinton Park.

Above: Chor Boogie mural at Market and 6th.

Above: Original oil on canvas painting by Jack Leamy on display at The Luggage Store, a gallery at Market and 6th.

Above: Local artist Jeremy Novy stencils koi fish all over the city. These were are located at Market and 6th.

Above: Chad Hasegawa mural at Market and 6th.

Above: Original oil on canvas painting by Amanda Lynn on display at Cassel Gallery at 1261 Howard Street.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 23, 2011 at 4:42 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

July 22, 2011

Coonie Cam

Coonie's been coming in every night and stealing the cat food. Doh!

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 22, 2011 at 1:59 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

July 19, 2011

Two Ways of Seeing a River

When I first came here, I took the GPS off of my bike and stuck it in my backpack. Without it, the city maintained it's mystery. I'd drive until I was blissfully lost in the 11 hills of San Francisco, dodging pigeons and the shadows of pigeons, deftly and nimbly skating across the city's cable car tracks.

When I drove across Mexico on a dirt bike, I deliberately didn't take a map. I intentionally did not research the trip before I left, because I wanted to discover the country, as Cortez had seen it.

There is immeasurable value in being lost. In searching and discovering. This is the goal of being alive. To somehow, carry around this mystery and hand it to others. In my mind, this is "the pearl" that Kerouac was referring to.

But after grid searching the Mission, the Loin, and SOMA for graffiti, the city has lost much of it's mystery. I'm finding it much harder to get lost in San Francisco, these days.

I've spent a great deal of time studying the flowers and trees of the city, culminating in my recent purchase of "The trees of San Francisco", a ghastly misstep. Now, instead of carrying these mysteries around with me, turning them over and over in my mind, bathing them with attention as an oyster coats a grain of sand...instead of this, countless mysteries were slain in a single misstep. I have the book beside me now and if I had any sense of integrity I'd throw it in trash.

The book does to the flora of San Francisco what the GPS does to the city streets. It eviscerates the mystery of the city. Reduces the city from an idyllic, mysterious xanadu to didactic grid of streets and blocks. An urban soliloquy. Something less than the sum of it's parts.

I used to see the delicious murals splayed across the cityscape as magnificent, romantic dreams of some clandestine artist creating art for art's sake. Beautiful visions of naked altruism in city by the bay. Pure, unadulterated beauty to lift the spirits of the city's denizens. But now, I see them differently. Now, I see the murals and I think "oh, that's by Amanda Lynn, Chad Hasegawa, Andrew Schoultz, Dan Plasma, ROA, or Chor Boogie. And I know which gallery is displaying their work. And even the hours that the gallery is open. And who owns the gallery. And it's not that it's not great art, it's superb art. But when the mystery is stripped away, some of the lustre is peeled away as well.

Robert M. Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, made a number of insightful observations. One that I especially liked was when he made reference to an observation by Mark Twain. Pirsig wrote:

"Mark Twain's experience comes to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty."

I loved the observation. What he alluded to is singularly brilliant. Something I'd always felt, but never admitted. However, Pirsig didn't quote Mark Twain exactly, or make reference to the exact source of this observation anywhere in his book. Of course, I wanted to find exactly what Mark Twain had said and last night, after grid searching the mission for graffiti, I stumbled across this:

"Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!" - Mark Twain - Life on the Mississippi - Two Ways of Seeing a River

Yes. Of course. Always I've felt this, but never had the courage to admit it. I admire Robert Pirgsig, Samuel Clemens, Jack Kerouac, and Henry Miller because of their courage. It's difficult to imagine saying what you truly feel, without considering the consequences. As my uncle once observed, "we all wear different hats for different people". We all expose different truths and fears to different people. Only among our closest and most trusted friends do we truly approach being ourselves - expressing our deepest fears and greatest hopes.

And yet, Mark Twain comes out and, after studying the river in depth, instead of bragging that "I've now mastered the Mississippi River, and I know it as well as most riverboat pilots"...instead of this...he comes out and admits something that's deeply disturbing...that something's found, but something's lost as well. The river's mystery is irretrievably lost.

And this is where I am with San Francisco, I'm afraid.

After work, I drive to Central Computers and try to return my new laptop, but they're not interested. I'm stuck with this brick. Brilliant.

The homeless turn a trash can over in the street, a dig carefully through the contents. A homeless pinata. They dig through the city's entrails like oracles reading tea leaves.

Now home to clean my camera's sensor with listerine and qtips. Probably not officially sanctioned by Canon, I imagine. Now, to wander the city. Where to go? Where to go? I decide to scope out the Haight, so down to Haight street and rolling through lower Haight and upper Haight. I find a few new murals I've not seen before. Recognize many I've shot before. Eventually, I grow bored with the Haight and decide to go off in search of the West Portal.

I roll up Market and once Market starts to climb up Twin Peaks, it just turns into the autobahn, apparently. People are racing up the hill going like 60 mph and I'm trying not to get run over is all. I get lost trying to find the West Portal, and some people are shouting at me. I pull up to them and kill the engine.

"Pop a wheelie," they call to me.

"Uh. OK. Where's the West Portal?"

"I'm going there now. Follow me." So I follow this stranger to the West Portal and he wave to me when we get there. It's sort of odd, this place. I remember clearly when I first stumbled onto it. I was like...what the h3ll? It's a tunnel, that goes into the mountain, and where it leads, no one is sure. There is no East Portal. I'm not really clear what happens to those people the West Portal swallows.

Now back up over the hill on Portola, to Market and back down from Twin Peaks. At the bottom, where Market turns back into a nightmare of traffic and red lights, I'm paralyzed by sirens and flashing lights.

I hear the city's sirens in my dreams. They haunt me day and night. At home. At work. In my dreams. Ambulances and car alarms. Wailing civil defense sirens and fire trucks. Police cars and earthquakes. Tires squealing as the cars crash into each other in the streets below. This mad, inescapable cacophony of life and death is carved indelibly into my brain.

This cop comes flying up behind me and I don't know what to do. I'm not going to run. I'm not going to flush like a pheasant from the field. I have no idea what's going on and I just hold tight and this cop comes flying up behind me, swerves around me, nearly killing me in the process. He goes screaming by and misses me by a couple of feet maybe. Scares the living hell out of me and I swear it will be a miracle if I live through my project here. It will be a miracle.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 19, 2011 at 12:11 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

July 15, 2011

The Calends of July

Above: A piece by Amanda Lynn on Clinton Park Street in the Mission District in San Francisco.

Above: A piece by FindingSF on Caledonia Street.

Above: Another piece on Caledonia Street. Author unknown. I originally shot this earlier in the year and posted it, but had forgotten where I'd seen it. I'd originally assumed it to be a wheatpaste, but it looks to me to be an original painting.

"breaking cracking leaves. 100 sneezes echoing i need a lulaby[sic]. sleep creeping in under my cheekbones and fingers slow words spilling in half time like instant replay in some sick and twisted dream game and my head is playing faint songs I've never heard. Typewriter on my knees and paper shaking searching madly for some word some scrap of something written down and lost again. I want to know what it feels like to hold a handful of worms in the crepuscular predawn of some stormy sunday. we are doing a dull thing with style not nodding or shaking our heads now you are trapped in my dreamworld. blink"

Above: Image shot on Clinton Park Street east of Valencia.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 15, 2011 at 10:39 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

July 14, 2011

Fog City Photos

Above: A work by Irvine-based Michael Kershnar by the Space Gallery's front door on Polk & Hemlock in Tenderloin Heights.

Above: FindArtMagazine cargo truck at Geary Street and Leavenworth Street in San Francisco.

Above: According to The Tender, this "ever-changing wall" on the corner of Geary and Leavenworth is maintained by Gallery Heist. I believe this is by Irvine-based Michael Kershnar in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.

Above: Wheatpaste on parking meter at Gallery Heist on Geary and Leavenworth.

Above: Mural by JoSF, Solar, Logic, and Madcat at 81 Cedar Street in Tenderloin Heights. Update: They also did the rainforest mural at Master Car Care at 740 O'Farrell Street, but I've never seen it rolled down.

Above: Sign at the entrance to the Tenderloin National Forest at Ellis Street and Cohen Place in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. This park was reclaimed from the homeless drug addicts by Darryl Smith and Laurie Lazer of The Luggage Store, a local art gallery.

Above: A mural in the Tenderloin National Forest at Ellis Street and Cohen Place in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. This mural is by the artist "Bounce". I believe that this is the same "Bounce" here.

Above: A mural in the Tenderloin National Forest at Ellis Street and Cohen Place in San Francisco's Tenderloin district.

Above: This is actually an original oil painting commissioned by UCSF hanging indoors at Parnassus Heights, but I thought it was pretty interesting.

Above: Mural by Max Ehrman aka "EON75" in the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District. Here are some images of the work in progress.

Above: Mural by Max Ehrman aka "EON75" in the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 14, 2011 at 12:13 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

July 13, 2011

Escape From Fog City

Down the Rabbit Hole

Bringing the art out of the galleries and hanging it outdoors on the city walls en plein air was revolutionary. It fundamentally changed the relationship of the artist to the art work to the gallery. Suddenly, I'm not an observer any more. I'm part of the scene.

The galleries are showing the work of graffiti artists.

So, the graffiti street artists are bringing their work into the galleries. And the artists that normally hang their work in the galleries are taking their work out and clandestinely putting it up on the city's walls.

The artists are now creating rolling art galleries, driving them across the country, and parking them on the street, where people walk right up into the back of a cargo van to see the art. But even these viewers aren't what they seem, as they're also always looking for new talent, so the people that come into the rolling galleries are both artists and patrons or clients.

The entire nature of the relationship has changed, and all of this occurs to me as the guy rolls up the back of the van.

They've just obliterated the wall between the performers and the audience. The guy is standing there, holding the door open for me to crawl into the back of his cargo truck, and everything's unraveling. And it's not a superficial change that's been made. He's thrown down the gauntlet. He's just torpedoed my worldview and I'm falling down the rabbit hole.

All the world's indeed a stage, we are merely players. Performers and portrayers. Each another's audience upon the gilded stage.

As I'm standing in the tenderloin watching the whores and drug addicts stumbling up and down the sidewalks of skid row, I'm wearing camoflauge pants, a black leather jacket, and a white motorcycle helmet, crawling around on all fours and shooting like mad, it occurs to me that I'm part of this mad play that's all around me. I'm no longer an observer. I've crossed over some invisible threshold and become part of the scene. I'm tumbling down the rabbit hole.

This is like the part in the Matrix where you have to choose between the red pill and the blue pill. But I don't have a choice here.

And the problem is this...the problem is very fundamental....these people in the art galleries... are charging thousands of dollars for art work that looks like a 9 year old could knock it out in a few minutes with their eyes closed...and the people in the galleries are displaying, marketing, and selling this work for an insane profit.

Normally, I'm fairly comfortable as seeing myself as an observer. I drive around the city on my motorcycle, deftly dodging the skateboarders and handicapped beggars, taking photos and moving on.

But I have noticed that, if I stop to study something, and photograph it, I have noticed that other people begin to take notice of it also. Always this was something that I dismissed. A curiosity, but nothing requiring a shift in my world-view paradigm.

But now, I'm standing in the center of the action. There's no denying it any more. I'm no longer an observer. I'm a reluctant participant. An unwitting accomplice.

The police arrive just in time and I'm chomping at the bit. Foaming at the mouth. This is going to be great. I can't wait to see the police unleash a furious assault on these mongrels. A real Rodney King-style beat down. A WWF smackdown played out in real life right here on Geary Street.

I'm thinking I'll walk into the corner grocery, pick out a 40 oz beer, kick the homeless Rasputin character out of the road-side Lazy Boy, and watch it all go down. This should be a thing of beauty.

But instead, the police head straight for my motorcycle. I'm still wearing my helmet and there's no license plate on my bike. They'll put this together real quick. Suddenly, I'm thinking I'm in their crosshairs.

But they walk right by the motorcycle with no license plate. Right past the broken whores and homeless crack addicts. Past the near-human handicapped gimps rolling downhill in motorized wheelchairs. Past the illegally parked rolling canvas with California plates that say FINDART. Past the thin pale hippie spraypainting the front of the truck on Geary street.

This fog comes into the city now thick as cream. It comes in like a tide from the coast that doesn't obey the shore. It just keeps right on rolling into the city.

Foghorns sound out in the bay. These ships out there...how they make it I can't say. Can't know. Can't guess. They're on the bay though, sailing through this whipping cream, sounding their fog horns almost continuously. The Golden Gate and the Bay Bridges have horns as well. They're talking back and forth...the bridges and the ships...they have this dialog...they're all talking at once now...madness.

The police cut a lock off a door, climb back into their black and white cruiser and disappear into the fog.

I don't think you could get arrested in this town if you tried. You'd have to physically assault someone to get any police attention. Short of that, you're not on their radar, I'm afraid.

My laptop is old and battered. It's essentially non-functioning at this point. It sounds like a lawnmower on a gravel driveway when it's working, and it won't work unless it's plugged in. The battery is completely useless.

I'm so excited by my near-life-experience with the artists I want to write. I want to buy a laptop that works, so I drive to Central Computers to see if they'll sell me a laptop, but they're closed so I'm left to wander the city streets on two wheels in the dying light.

Nob Hill

I start rolling up Nob Hill, and I notice that the poverty seems to be focused closer to sea level. As you climb the hills, you leave behind the homeless, so that the crime and poverty seem to flow downhill. The peaks are all powdered with the affluent and well heeled bourgeois.

Of course, this is just death to me. Nothing that interests me in the least.

The Bike

The bike can smell fear like a woman. It knows when I wake up if I'm afraid. You can't ride a wheelie unless you're completely insane. Bold.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 13, 2011 at 3:00 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

The Tenderloin National Forest

On the way into work, I see that the artist has completed a painting on Polk Street I've been following for a few weeks, so I stop to shoot it. I don't think "Oh, I'll shoot it later." That doesn't work. If you think 'I'll shoot it later', then you're not a photographer. That's how you can tell. If you want a photo, you stop the bike right now and take a shot. It's the only way. There is no other way.

So, I stop and shoot the mural and the art is brilliant, of course. But I can't quite figure out what I'm seeing. It's a painting of a street scene, but I'm not quite getting it. I'm looking across the street. Apparently, I'm supposed to make something from it. I'm glancing around. Part of it looks right...the planter..the trees. Buildings aren't quite right...but close. Then, I turn around and suddenly I see exactly what he painted. He painted the street behind me. So, if you turn around, you see the exact same scene in real life. Brilliant.

But another screaming firetruck drags me back down into a hellish nightmare. Back into the boiling crucible of madness that is San Francisco. Marred by wailing sirens, earthquakes, and traffic.

They say the generals are always ready to fight the last war, and no place is that more true than San Francisco. Because the city burned in 1906, they're constantly overreacting to countless emergencies.

If you multiple the number of buildings and the number of people in the city times the probability at any point in time that a building or a person is having a crisis, you come up with the fact that there are countless emergencies unfolding all over the city, day and night.

And every emergency is inundated with a wailing fleet of emergency vehicles. Firetrucks. Ambulances. Police. You name it.

It can really get to you after a while. I mean, it's nice to be in the city, and all. But every time I'm driving my bike and a fire engine comes racing up behind me I think I'm going to die.

These block-long fire engines come screaming up behind me the adrenaline rises inside to a crescendo and I nearly lose my mind. These things are loud and long as they race past like an asteroid from outer space and after they pass, you're left, still moving down the street, but drowning in adrenaline. It's hard to know what to do. It's so confusing...so distracting...at a time when you need to stay so clearly focused on the task at hand...driving through the asynchronous bifurcating streams of traffic without dying.

Every car horn rattles me beyond words because, right away, I think, "Am I about to get run over? Am I about to die?" And it's the only acceptable response to a car horn. He's trying to get someone's attention, and it might well be you he's beeping at. If you assume they're honking at someone else, you do so at your own peril. And if you're wrong in that assumption, it may cost you dearly.

I've been in the city so long that I've started to get somewhat rattled from it.

At work, the fire engines and ambulances and police scream away day and night with their sirens.

"Sometimes, I just wish they'd take the sirens off of the firetrucks and police cars and the ambulances. Maybe we'd be better off if the people died quietly and the buildings burned down to ashes in a peaceful and serene silence," I offer at work. Everyone looks at me like I'm insane. I get that a lot, really.

Almost as if on cue, a civil defense siren starts wailing and I'm like..."Christ...what is that for? Is there no end to this madness?"

"THIS IS ONLY A TEST. IN THE EVENT OF AN ACTUAL EMERGENCY YOU"D BE DEAD BY NOW..." the voice inside my head is telling me.

"Where is that coming from?" I ask a girl at work. "Is it inside the building? Outside?"

"I dunno," she replies. "They do it ever so often. About once a month I'd say."

"Christ. Who could live here?" I wonder.

Wheatpaste Artists

Yesterday, I discovered that a lot of the art I've been seeing around the mission is hanging inside a gallery on Larkin near Geary. I'm curious to know what's up with that. Are they using the city as a billboard to advertise their work? That takes balls.

And, sure enough, I walk into this art gallery and they have these same images hanging on the walls. Just a bunch of whacked out images some guy named David Young threw together. And it's not that it's not good. That's not my point. A lot of it is good.

I don't normally like want to hear what the artists have to say. The reason is that, to me, the art should stand on it's own merit. Hearing some drug-addled pseudo-intellectual artsy type expound on what he was trying to communicate when he created a certain piece of art always always makes me want to take my own life. It seriously can ruin a piece of art for me to hear them droning on and on in a ego-fueled soliloquy about a bunch of nonsense like this:

"The work for Make An Effort is a continuation of Young's exploration of a theoretical post-apocalyptic San Francisco - a rebuilt world, full of new ideals, technology, religion and language created from scratch. "

This sort of self-indulgent mindless drivel makes me want to hang myself.

Not that the art pieces are bad. Some of them, I'm looking at and thinking...that'd be cool to have that in my house back in Colorado.

"Who did the wheatpasted images on the outside of the building?" I ask, referring to the U.S. currency based images I'd located previously.

"That's by James Charles," she replies.

But then, I think, wait a minute. I think I've been duped. I'm just shocked, I guess, at the connection between the artist and the wheatpasted images around the city and the gallery. Like, it's all a brilliant conspiracy, I think.

And, probably, technically, they couldn't prove that the artist put the images up across the city, but I think the preponderance of evidence would suggest that he was involved in some way.

I emerge from the gallery with a renewed zeal to understand what, exactly, it is that I'm seeing. Have I been duped? Am I a stool pigeon? Is the tenderloin just an extension of the art galleries?

So now, I'm grid searching the loin, but with the new world view. With the new perspective. I assume that I've not seen anything. That there's more wheatpaste and graffiti in the city than I could ever imagine. More than I could ever find.

I spot a painted panel van on Geary and Leavenworth, where I've seen some interesting wheatpaste graffiti before. So I stop to shoot the truck. I park the bike and start shooting the back of this panel van...it has this massive mural of a bunny on meth.

And I start to take a shot of the mural on the back of the truck and, as I do, this guy steps up and says..."there's much more inside." And he rolls up the back of the truck to reveal an art gallery inside the back of the cargo truck. There's a row of steps leading from the street up into the bed of the cargo truck.

I look at the guy and then back at the inside of the cargo truck. I've seen enough "I Shouldn't Be Alive" episodes to recognize a trap when I see one, albeit a well-constructed one.

I'm like..."for realz bro?"

At first, I don't go near the truck because I think it's some kind of a trap. Like, they're going to capture me and drive me across the bay to Oakland and auction me off to a bunch of gay meth addicts or something.

But, as I study the van, I notice that one wall is opened up about 2 feet, so I could climb out the side if I had to. So I walk up these steps into the back of the truck, and the art hanging on the walls is pretty good.

This guy is explaining to me that they're driving the truck across the country, discovering new artists and displaying their work. He hands me this little pamphlet that says Find Art Magazine.

And I'm like...for real? Like...who would think of this? You couldn't make stuff like this up.

I'm thumbing through the pamphlet and right away, I recognize the art of Jason Hailey (Chor Boogie). He paints all of the acid dream faces with disconnected eyes and teeth. I've seen his murals across the city. Very cool.

I climb out of the rolling art gallery and start walking around this truck and shooting it from all sides because it's wild looking. Make no mistake about that. It's well painted on all sides by several extremely gifted artists..

Now, as I'm shooting and wandering around this truck ...still wearing my helmet, mind you, another guy walks up and squats down to about bumper level in front of this parked cargo truck and starts taping over the truck's headlights with blue painter's tape.

A skinny white guy with a hat and a goatee. Kinda artsy looking, but in a cool forgivable sort of way.

And, right away, I'm like..."uh...dude...what are you doing?"

"Well, I'm going to lay down something here...something different than what they've got going on right now..."

"You're gong to paint it?" I ask, incredulously.

"Mmmmhmmmm..."

"With spray paint?" I stutter.

"That's the plan..."

He's tearing up some cardboard boxes he found on the sidewalk and taping them over the van's windshield.

"Why are you parked here?" I ask the guy that originally attempted to lure me into the vehicle.

"We know some of the people that work in the art gallery right there, and they said we could hang out here, " he replies.

Only then do I realize that I'm surrounded by art galleries. On both sides of Geary, near Leavenworth, are several art galleries, as it turns out. So, I start wandering through these art galleries and I'm thinking...wtf? Why have I been in San Francisco for 6 months and never seen the inside of an art gallery? Like, seriously, dude. WTF?

I mean, how is it that I've missed the best part of being in a city:

So, of course, now I'm wandering through these art galleries and checking out the images. Some of it is that modern art that no one with any sense would want to see. But some of it is just brilliant.

Outside, the homeless are panhandling and smoking crack. I'm not joking. I'm standing here watching a guy smoke crack in a crack pipe. Watching the homeless bum cigarettes, change...whatever they can beg, borrow, or steal.

Small fractions of people roll by in motorized wheelchairs. Missing more limbs and body parts than you could imagine.

Whores stagger up and down the sidewalks. Bruised legs. Dirty knees. People set sofas and lounge chairs out on the sidewalks and the homeless bed down in them.

And a guy is spraypainting a truck on the street.

And now the police come. And I'm thinking...well.. this ought to be interesting. Things are going to be different now. But nothing changes. The police don't care what's going on. I mean, I'm standing here at ground zero in Sodom and Gomorrah and the police are just whistling past the graveyard.

Seemingly oblivious to everything going on around us.

There are so many crimes being committed that, if you started writing tickets, you could write until your hands bled and your pens ran out of ink and not begin to mitigate the crime on this one corner of the city.

Somehow, I think the police realize this, so they just ignore the human circus around us. They wander up to a door, deeply buried beneath countless graffiti slogans and wheatpasted images. They cut a lock off of the door, climb into their squad car and disappear into the madness that is San Francisco.

Only now do I realize how much I love this city. How mad the city is, and how much I need the chaos and insanity. This is the coolest place on earth. I'm standing in the nadir of western civilization.

Tenderloin National Forest

I leave the madness of Leavenworth and Geary and continue grid searching the Tenderloin for graffiti.

I quickly stumble into a little garden behind a wrought iron gate. A sign says "Tenderloin National Forest". I'm about to bust a gut laughing. The "Tenderloin" is "skid row". Not a nice place. Who would think of such a thing? Hilarious. But here, in the heart of the Tenderloin stands an immaculate little garden of flowers and trees, with massive murals adorning the walls.

I wander into the garden and start shooting like a meth addict because now I know that I'm hooked. I'm hooked on the beauty of the city - the murals that the artists throw onto the canvas that is the city of San Francisco.

But now, the gardener appears, a young goateed hipster. I start asking him who did the murals and, unlike most people, this guy actually knows something He knows who did each mural and I'm like..."Holy Moses...someone who actually knows whats going on for once. Nice."

At the end of the garden, a large painted tornado and a tree and he names the artist - Andrew Schoultz. And I'm like..."this guy - Shultz - he did the painting on the building on Lexington Street in the mission, right? With the elephant and the bird houses and everthing?"

"Mmmhhhmmm....that's right...it's the same guy.",

"Who did the bear? I've seen that before."

"That's by Chad Hasegawa," he replies.

And I'm like...oh wow. How cool is that? I'm starting to understand everything works. Starting to ptiece it all together.

Of course now, I can't wait to start wheatpasting my own images all over the city. Now that I see how it's done, I predict that someone will start wheatpasting up "Killing Strangers" posters and "Peenie Wallie" posters all over the city.

The Grove

I was really dreading going to The Grove tonight because I hang out there all the time and, although, in theory, it's a place to meet people, in practice, I seldom meet anyone. Most of the chicks that I hit on treat me like I have the plague. And I don't usually talk to the other guys in there, because I'm not trying to pick up on them, of course.

But tonight there was a guy sitting on the bench where I normally sit, so I sat down beside him and we started talking. Turns out that he used to live in Conifer, near my house in Colorado. And recently moved back to San Francisco. And has taken long cross country motorcycle trips like me. And used to live on Singer Island.

He's as cool as the other side of the pillow, and it's nice to meet new people because, honestly, I've not met a lot of people out here. Probably because I'm getting more antisocial as I get older? I'm not sure. But I was glad as hell to meet this guy and the funny thing is, he looks exactly like my brother.

"...I was a young writer and I wanted to take off. Somewhere along the line, I knew there'd be girls, visions, and everything; somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me." - Jack Kerouac, "On The Road"

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 13, 2011 at 1:44 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

July 11, 2011

On The Road

...I'd often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off."
- Jack Kerouac, "On The Road"

I wake up this morning and the alarm's going off and the sun is shining and I think 'Oh man. I overslept." But it's only 6:00 a.m. I didn't oversleep. I don't want to get up though. I don't want to get out of bed. Don't want to go to California today, but then I think...what's the big deal? It's only for 4 days. And it's not like I'm going to anything if I stay here except hibernate.

So I drag myself out of bed. Throw some clothes in a little handbag. Connect my new UPS to the network before I leave the house. Clean up a bit.

Why is it that I'm so bad about procrastinating? Why is it that I get so much more done when there's a deadline involved. Why is the sky blue? Because it is.

I'm re-reading Kerouac's On The Road and it's brilliant, of course. It makes me want to travel. And one thing that I'm picking up now that I'm re-reading it is how sad he is when he's on the road. It's a recurring comment made at least every 5 pages or so.

"Happiness among intelligent men is the rarest thing I know." - Ernest Hemmingway

And it's funny to read about Kerouac's travels across the country because he did it all on a shoestring. He never had more than a few dollars in his pocket at any point in time. He hitchhiked across the country, or road buses when he could afford it.

But reading the book really does make me want to travel again. I mean, not that I'm not traveling. All I do is travel. But more, I'd say, he makes me want to drive the dirt bike up to Alaska. Makes me want to leave tomorrow.

Some of the quotes I like from the book so far:

"...outside of being a sweet girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things."

"...and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars..."

"...and this was really the way that my whole road experience began, and the things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell..."

"...I was a writer and needed new experiences..."

"...and in his excited way of speaking, I heard again the voices of companions and brothers under the bridge, along the wash-lined neighborhood and drowsy doorsteps of afternoon..."

"...I was a young writer and I wanted to take off. Somewhere along the line, I knew there'd be girls, visions, and everything; somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me."

I'll stop there. These quotes were all lifted from the first chapter. This book is indescribably brilliant. I wonder how many people have sat down and tried to re-create this magic...to re-write their own story using "On The Road" as their model. I bet a million people have tried and failed.

So I roll out of bed and try to cobble together the things I'll need on the left coast, and things I'll need along the way. Boarding passes. Keys. Boots. Jacket. Passport. Credit cards. Cash. Building passes for another time zone.

I roll into the early morning truck and down the rocky mountains toward the madness of Denver as the traffic starts to build.

Skipping through the stations, I'm trying to find something I can listen to. I end up listening to the Train song on my CD though and wishing I could be on the road. Not bouncing back and forth in a 737 with winglets, but balling across the highways like Kerouac. Thumbing across the plains.

Some might think my life is crazy, but it's fairly predictable. I bounce back and forth between California and Colorado like a ping pong ball in a dryer. I ride wheelies through the city on a dirt bike with no license plate. Go off-roading through the Golden Gate National Recreation Area like I own the place. I wander around the mission and the tenderloin shooting graffiti and the homeless.

But there's not much variation, really. I'd say I'm fairly predictable and boring, at this point. I remember when I met Hunter S. Thompson at a booksigning in Denver. He had them bring him scotch and then he knocked over a roll of paper towels like he was furious, but then when the roll of paper towels hit one of the girls at the book signing, he was apologizing all over himself and you could tell it was all act.

Thats sort of how I am, I think.

I act like a rebel, but I'm far from it, really. I'm more like a retarded, bourgeois pretender, I think. More like Holden Caulfield or Ignatius Reilly than Sal Paradise.

30,000 feet below me, the country scrolls by. Today, I'm sitting on the starboard side of the plane just because I like to switch it up a bit. Sal Paradise is rolling across the high desert down there far below me, and I'm switching sides of the plane to get a different view. That's my rebellion. Ridiculous really.

I should sleep, but I don't really feel like it, so I'm reading On The Road and glancing out the window, watching the Rocky Mountains pass, then the high desert. Gradually, the precipitation tapers off and now Lake Powell and the Grand Canyon. Finally, Nevada with is just so barren and lifeless you can't know. Looks like the moon would look if only it were the color of Mars.

Finally, we pass into California, and then gradually down into the Los Angeles basin. You just can't know how bad the air here is. But you could walk on it. I'm sure planes have accidentally landed on the smog, only to realize their mistake, and take off again to land at LAX or OC or Burbank.

We touch down at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, and I plan to change sides. I want to sit on the port side for the second leg into San Francisco, but they come on and say we're delayed several hours due to fog in San Francisco.

So I deboard and wander around the John Wayne Airport in OC. I'm staggering through this dismal little airport and my sister texts me and says she finally made it home from their 1 year round the world odyssey. And they're so happy to be home you can't know.

How funny it is that we have such a poor idea of what might make us happy. I think happiness is more of a miracle than it is science. Collectively, we spend a lot of time trying to think, rationally, what should make us happy. But I suspect logic has nothing to do with it. Happiness occurs at a much lower level in the human brain. It comes before logic. Before thought. Long before reason.

Reason is something we apply to emotions after the fact. A band aid on a scratch.

Attraction is the same way. You can sit around all day and try to think, logically, why it is that you're attracted to someone. And you may fool yourself into coming up with a solution..."because they're good-looking". But this is all nonsense. It's just logic trying to paper over something it can't begin to understand.

You are happy because you are. You are sad because you are. You are attracted to someone because you are. All of this occurs at a primal level that evolved long before the logical section of the brain existed.

At OC, some guy is hugging all over this girl and I can see that she's going to leave him. She will. Even she can't tell yet. But I can see deeper in the stone than she can chisel. He's too open. Too sincere. He likes her too much. It'll never work. She'll crush him in the end. Of this I'm certain.

No woman really wants a man that's attracted to her. If there's anything I'm sure of...it's that. If I've learned anything on the this planet, it's that people want what they can't have and what they can have, they certainly have no use for. I'm as sure of this as anyone's ever been certain of anything in the history of time.

And I'm sorry for them both, that they're so happy, because I know it will end. It will all come crashing down like a chandelier in an earthquake.

I'm sitting next to them for hours. This is how I get to study them. He's geeky and she's beautiful with some ridiculous French accent and she's so young she still has baby teeth I figure and I know it will never work. It's none of my business, of course, so I say nothing. It's not like they're asking for my permission to be enjoying themselves in this continuous public display of affection.

But I'm shaking my head like my grandmother watching a toddler disapprovingly. It's all in vain. All for naught.

Hours later, we take off for San Francisco.

The woman in front of me is beautiful and staring out the window at the scene unfolding below.

Casually, I keep her abreast of our location as we perambulate north along the left coast.

That's Catalina Island. Pismo Beach. Big Sur. San Simeon, Hearst Castle. Santa Cruz, Four Mile Beach.

I point all of these things out to her. Her husband is right beside her but I don't care. I'm bored. They're from Ohio and they've never seen California before and I think about that. I think about how much time I've spent out here. Driving up and down the coast on two wheels and four and I think...you know...maybe I'm closer to Sal Paradise than I'd suspected. Maybe on the Ignatius Reilly to Sal Paradise scale...maybe I'm a little closer to Sal than I'd realized.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 11, 2011 at 11:51 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Oenbrinks Land in the USA?

Rumor has it that my sister and her family are back in the USA?
Confirmed. They're back in the U.S. and heading to McDonald's apparently.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 11, 2011 at 12:53 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

July 10, 2011

'Screed' Wheatpaste in San Francisco's Tenderloin

This guy "Screed" is throwing up some crazy art in San Francisco's tenderloin with wheatpaste. I'm not really sure what the message is, but the first one I noticed appears to be the monster from Alien impregnating Abraham Lincoln on a five dollar bill. I saw this one in a few places around the loin. This image is dated 5/14/11.

Update: The guy doing this modified currency wheatpaste is James Charles.

Above: This one appears to be the lion from the Wizard of Oz on some form of US currency. Also dated 05/14/11. Update: Wheatpaste artist is James Charles.

Note: The shades the lion is wearing appear to have been added later, possibly by another artist. I'm not clear what the inscription says. It's in the font of the Ray Ban logo, though, and it appears to read "Riot Croem" or "Riot Crown"...something like that.

Above: This one appears US currency with a self portrait of Van Gogh, along with some of his stars from Starry Night. Also dated 05/14/11. Update: Wheatpaste artist is James Charles.

Above: A few days later, this gets added. This is a familiar wheatpaste image that I've seen around the mission. It's a pinko-kommie-socialist theme that artists are drawn to like a moth to a flame. That "can't we all get along" and "wouldn't life be great if no one got ahead and no one got left behind" lefty liberal kommie propaganda. You see that what's on his mind is making $, which is bad, of course. Very bad. Adding value to society is almost always seen as a bad thing in the counter-culture, because then the people that lie around in the streets doing drugs can't feel good about themselves. So, somehow, that's your fault, komrade.

Above: More lefty propaganda.

Above: Here's a flyer from the HNJ kommies that recently took over the Sierra Hotel on Mission and 20th.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 10, 2011 at 11:29 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

What not to wear

I walked into a store in San Francisco a while back...about a month or two ago...and I bought some motorcycle riding gear. The store is called Cycle Gear at 1500 Harrison Street. They were nice and friendly and helped me pick out some gear. I got a jacket and some pants. Ran me about $480 with taxes. But, it worked. It kept me warm when I was riding. Sometimes too warm, but at least I wasn't freezing cold when I rode any more, and that was my goal.

The jacket was OK. The jacket was a BILT brand jacket. It served the purpose. The thing I could never understand was that they said that the shell wasn't waterproof, but the (inner) liner was. And I was like? Seriously? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. But they assured me the shell wasn't waterproof but the liner was. This makes no sense. If anything should be waterproof, it has to be the shell. Not the liner.

The pants were OK as well. They were made by FirstGear. The thing I didn't like about the pants was that there were two zippers, one for the liner, and one for the pants. At first, this didn't seem like a big deal, but if you ride every day like me, it's a huge deal actually. It's a royal pain to always have to deal with multiple zippers. Just sucks.

The other problem was the knee pads...they bothered my knees. Never felt very comfortable. I tried adjusting them, but nothing helped really. The knee pads always bothered me.

And I'd had these pants and the jacket for about a month and then one day, I was zipping up the jacket, and the freaking zipper came apart in my hands. Ditto for the pants. A day or two later, and the liner zipper just fell apart. I took the gear back to Cycle Gear, and they were nice enough to refund my money, but buyer beware. I'd stay away from this gear. I had it about a month and it all just came apart like crap.

I still need to buy some cycle gear, but I can promise you it won't be BILT or FirstGear quality. Never again.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 10, 2011 at 11:13 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Hummingbird Dogfights

Jen and Allie come back from shopping loaded down with crap. Just junk they bought shopping at the mall. Stuff they don't need, of course, but things that satiate them temporarily, keeping boredom at bay through the long days of summer.

I'm sure I'm a bad parent. I'm sure that I shouldn't allow these little spurious transgressions. But what else is there in life but to spoil your kids.

I think that the people that are the most down on this are people who are just stoic and taciturn by nature. They enjoy telling others what to do, even when it involves something as private as how we raise our own children. Brilliant that others would tell us how to go about these endeavors. Fascinating that people without children think they can offer advice to those that do.

The more I watch kids grow up, the more resilient I think they are. I think that kids will survive into adulthood regardless of whether they're over-indulged as children.

I suspect there's hope for these two.

Yesterday, bored of watching the girls play "Go Fish" and "James Bond", two card games requiring precious little skill, I taught them to play Spades.

They both picked it up very quickly, and readily agreed it was far superior to the games they had been playing. And we sat there for some time, playing Spades.

Next door, I taught the neighbors to play and we sipped tequila until it was quite dark out.

And on the way home, I wondered that I'd never taught Jennifer to play the game before. Why did I wait until now? What else have I failed to show her as a parent? I'm afraid my shortcomings are too numerous to list.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 10, 2011 at 5:39 PM : Comments (1) | Permalink

July 8, 2011

Shipwreck in the Sea of Cortez

A fishing boat went down in a bad storm in the Sea of Cortez last Sunday. Most of the people were from the bay area. 8 people were lost...one was later found deceased...7 are still missing. Here's the story of one of the survivors that lives in Novato, in Sonoma County just north of Petaluma.

"Zuger said he had a bad feeling about the weather when he slunk to his bunk at 11 p.m. after a night of partying on the back deck. It was their first day at sea and the fishing was to begin in the morning, but 6-foot swells were already slapping the 115-foot boat. The wind was blowing at 30 knots.

"I figured the captain could handle it," he said. "And then at 2:30 a.m. Jim Miller (of Sonoma County) ran in and yelled, 'Let's get out now! We're sinking!' "

Zuger, dressed only in swimming trunks, dashed to the deck. To his horror, he found that the boat was not pointed into the by-now 50-knot winds, as nautical sense would dictate, but sideways.

"That was it, I knew we were going down," he said. He leaped in - and in one minute, the boat was beneath the waves."

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 8, 2011 at 9:26 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Thief Steals Picasso Sketch from SF Art Gallery

On Tuesday morning, this guy walks into an art gallery on the corner of Union Square in San Francisco and just takes a Picasso sketch off the wall and walks out. Apparently, no one saw him do it. The surveillance camera of a store nearby had a video of him walking down the street with it. Then he hopped in a cab and went to the Palomar Hotel on Market and 4th, about 2 blocks away. I think this was how they caught him...the found the cab he took and figured out he went to the Palomar Hotel and then pieced it together from that. Insane.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/08/MNC41K7JHQ.DTL&tsp=1

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 8, 2011 at 11:02 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

July 7, 2011

15 Year Old Stabs His Mother

This happened about 4-5 miles from my house. Yikes.

http://www.canyoncourier.com/content/arrest-made-stabbing-woman-near-marshdale

Jeffco sheriff's deputies made an arrest late Wednesday afternoon in connection with the stabbing of a woman at a home in the 7700 block of Red Fox Drive near Marshdale.

A teenager was arrested in the area where the attack occurred, and reports indicated the teen is a suspect in the stabbing of his mother.

The victim was upgraded to fair condition Thursday morning at St. Anthony Hospital, according to a hospital spokesperson. She had been in serious condition on Wednesday evening.

The search for the suspect began about noon after a 911 call reported the stabbing. Deputies were stopping vehicles on Highway 73 and showing motorists a photo of the suspect.

The 911 call reported that an adult female had been stabbed at a home in the 7700 block of Red Fox Drive.

The suspect was described as 15 years old, with long dark hair, and wearing blue jeans and a blue shirt. People were told not to approach the suspect and to notify deputies if he was spotted.

Deputies had used search dogs in their effort to sweep the area.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 7, 2011 at 7:22 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

The Next Revolution: 16th and Mission

At lunch, I've been walking around the neighborhood lately. I have the motorcycle, but recently I've just been walking around the hood. It's a much different perspective. It allows me to interact more with the locals, as it were. Not that this is necessarily a good thing.

The neighborhood is about as rough as you can imagine. Police standing around with yellow tasers at the ready. The BART tunnels regurgitate armies of homeless people of all shapes, sizes, and colors from subterranean tubes.

The homeless and the hopeless are basking in the sun, smoking weed, drinking beer. Cashing their welfare checks and living off the toil of others.

Looking around, you get the feeling that a revolution could break out here at any minute. All it would take is the right spark and this place would riot in the blink of an eye.

The homeless actually took over the Sierra Hotel this weekend at 20th and Mission.

There are women here. Walking down the sidewalk. And I've never been physically assaulted. But this is about as rough as any place I've been.

And you think about that...you look at the crime maps of San Francisco and see how many robberies and murders and muggings there are every day, and you see how insane it is to be down here. But then you think, yeah, but there are a million people in the city. So, the odds of this happening to me are fairly slim.

And, that's true. Statistically speaking, that's sound rationalization. But right away, I realize that I'm basically employing the same strategy to stay alive as a school of bait fish. Basically, I'm a human, with a brain that has evolved over billions of years, and at the pinnacle of our society, I've basically come up with the same strategy for survival as a minnow.

I think that, instead of just praying the homeless don't devour us en masse on any given afternoon, we should go for a Fantastic Planet type of solution. We should take these people out in the bay and drown them. Seriously. I don't think that we should be paying them to do nothing, and I promise you that we are. I think that these people ought to be rounded up, put in chains, and forced to work in the fields. Or they ought to brand their faces with hot irons like Hernan Cortez did when he took over a village.

But I promise you this, if they don't do something in San Francisco to get the homeless under control, this city is going to go down the drain. At this rate, it'll be no different than Tijuana in another 10 years.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 7, 2011 at 12:16 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

July 6, 2011

Books

Tonight, I finished reading A Confederacy of Dunces. It was actually the third book in a row that I've read where the main character ends up getting committed to an asylum. (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Catcher in the Rye, Confederacy of Dunces.)

But Dunces was much lighter reading than Zen. I'd actually read Dunces before, but I remembered very little of it. I don't think the book is as brilliant as I'd hoped, but I enjoyed it.

So, the books I've read recently are:
Confederacy of Dunces
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Catcher in the Rye
To Kill a Mockingbird
Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs

I'm not sure what I'll pick up next. I'm thinking East of Eden or On the Road.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 6, 2011 at 11:41 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Peenie Wallie Lives

Dunno what that outage was about. I suspect that my modem wasn't connected and refreshed itself at some point. I dunno. But we're up and running now, baby.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 6, 2011 at 11:34 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

July 1, 2011

Bodega Bay

One of the last things my dried up old ex-girlfriend told me to do was check out Bodega Bay, and she'd apparently taken her spoiled urchin over there at some point, to check her into a home for wayward youths. I drove up there tonight after work...it's a long way. Round trip, I went about 150 miles.

At Petaluma, on the ride up, I stopped off to gas up. Figured I'd check the oil, as it's been smelling like it was burning a little. There was no oil on the dip stick, so I added about 2/3 of a quart of 20W 50.

Then, I ran out to the the little fishing village of Bodega Bay. Not a bad little place. But on the way back, I ran down to a little beach called Dillon Beach, which I actually thought was a little cooler than Bodega Bay.

Posted by Rob Kiser on July 1, 2011 at 1:04 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Peenie Wallie

A confused jumble of paranoid ramblings, politically incorrect diatribes, worthless photographs, amateur slideshows, and disturbing videos. Guaranteed to offend the narrow minded and amuse the rest.

July 31, 2011

Clear Creek Rafting

July 30, 2011

Mission Graffiti: Catching Up

Where indeed?

July 29, 2011

Coonie Lives!

July 27, 2011

Mission Graffiti: Miscellaneous

Mission Graffiti: Balmy Alley

Mission Graffiti: Lilac Alley

July 26, 2011

Mission Graffiti: Osage Alley

Campfire Tales

The more you look, the more you see

SOMA Graffiti: Langton Alley

July 25, 2011

The City is what it does to you

July 24, 2011

Feeding the 'Attack Deer'

July 23, 2011

The Weekly Photographs

July 22, 2011

Coonie Cam

July 19, 2011

Two Ways of Seeing a River

July 15, 2011

The Calends of July

July 14, 2011

Fog City Photos

July 13, 2011

Escape From Fog City

The Tenderloin National Forest

July 11, 2011

On The Road

Oenbrinks Land in the USA?

July 10, 2011

'Screed' Wheatpaste in San Francisco's Tenderloin

What not to wear

Hummingbird Dogfights

July 8, 2011

Shipwreck in the Sea of Cortez

Thief Steals Picasso Sketch from SF Art Gallery

July 7, 2011

15 Year Old Stabs His Mother

The Next Revolution: 16th and Mission

July 6, 2011

Books

Peenie Wallie Lives

July 1, 2011

Bodega Bay